@bryanb i have the same opinion as you. Raw video (more quality) or encoded video to match the youtube settings it almost make no difference at all. Slightly difference that i notice the raw video more blury and pixelized in some parts (maybe light transitions).

With just a relatively quick check, the raw video looks generally cleaner than the YouTube preset. I must have

Here’s an example of YT chewing up a 1080@video.

Look at this at 4K and again at 1080. The 4K playback is very close to the original, shot at 1080. Look at the 1080 playback and, in particular, look at the road seen through the windscreen. The original (4K playback) doesn’t have problems with pixelation. It’s an artifact added by YT.

I tried importing a video using your suggestion and then exporting, and when Shotcut imported, it was still at 1920x1080. So, I imported the video as normal i.e. default resolution of 1920x1080, but I exported it as 3840x2160.

FWIW, I’ve been playing around with YouTube uploads and I seem to get a cleaner image by converting from 4;2:0 to 4:2:2 before uploading. I don’t know if this is coincidence or something weird about the way YouTube’s transcoding interacts with the video, but they are cleaner if first converted to 4:2:2. The video comes out of my camcorder at 4:2:0.